April Update: Future plans, Style Explorations and Animation!

Dear Patrons,

Hope you are all doing well! I am still chugging along. I've been making animation tests of Evelyn, Elva, and now Sesam. Alba's animation can be seen above, and I've already shared the rest on social media. But I think they make for nice header videos here on Patreon, so I will also be putting them on top of the posts here, even if they aren't completely new :)

STYLE EXPLORATIONS:

Last month I shared a bit of vegitation explorations, and I thought it'd be nice to follow up with a bit more of that here. I know it's not as exciting as lore or new designs, but these little details still make all the difference!

There are a myriad of different ways to draw a tree, flower, or a blade of grass, and some definitely integrate much better with a character's shape language than others. Since we were going for a pretty stylized shape language for the characters, I wanted to see if we could push more stylizied shapes for the backgrounds as well.

Above are some initial explorations by Paula Huerta, who made last month's concept piece. The trees were most definitely stylized, but now we got into a bit of a balancing act. The trees should still feel wild, there has been no humans to preen them, after all.

Tanja Hass Nielsen then continued the explorations, trying to keep a specific eye on making a style that would also both be easily replicatable for other artists, and fast enough to make work on a TV-production schedule.

We ended up with a tree that I thought worked pretty nicely, and so she broke down the approach.

I then took a couple of the trees that had been made an cut them all together with a drawing of Zale. Now, this isn't an actual background or actual shot - it's wayy to rough for that, and line thickness hasn't been adjusted. But it's a test to see how the shapes work together.

We would refine further on some of the shape language when we jumped into making the backgrounds from the teaser. I felt that there were some types of shapes that definitely worked better with the character designs than others.

You can see how the shapes of the flowers and grass changed in the final picture:

There's definitely still more refinement to be done, but one of the important things that we got from this development, was among others, a brush package that allows us to land on a painterly look without actually requiring a lot of time rendering. And we got closer to defining a background shape language with some "do's" and "don'ts".

TROLLYWOOD ANIMATION FESTIVAL:

So what's coming up next? Well, in May I will be going to Sweden to do a talk at the Trollywood Animation Festival. It's going to be nice to travel a little bit for work, since I haven't gotten to do that nearly as much lately. The 2024 program hasn't been made public at the time of writing, but it shouldn't bee too long now.

INDIE ANIMATION PROJECT:

I'm helping out a little bit on another indie project. I'm really excited to animate a few shots on this, but I'll wait with sharing too many details until the creator makes it public. Above are just a few explorations/notes I did while practicing the design.

OTHER PROJECTS:

My schedule for the rest of the year is slowly starting to take form, although a lot isn't 100% certain yet. We're finishing up the TV-series production I've been animation supervising. Animation will be finished by the end of April, but I've been extended until the end of May to help out with compositing and marketing. I know I'm going to go to the Annecy animation festival in June. And then I hope that I will be able to take all the rest of June and July off to vacation and work on Tales of Zale... I'd really like to do some animation testing specifically for the pilot episode! And if I'm really sneaky and vague about it, I might even be able to share a couple of shots with you all - but no promises yet.

But I've also been told that I may be called upon in July and have to take August off instead, so we're going to have to see how things pan out. There's a feature film project coming up where I've been asked to do key animation for all of the animal scenes. So either way, I am most definitely going to be stretching the animal-animation muscles again soon.

Then, there are two projects that I've been asked to animation supervise. One feature, one short film. The latter still needs to secure the last bit of financing, but I'm rooting for it, because I think it'd be fun to work on. But of course, when we get to this point in time, we may also be getting some answers on the financing of ToZ, which will always take first priority. Though I think, even in the best case scenario, we will have to spend some more time on raising further financing and writing some more of the scripts, so there's a pretty decent chance that things may pan out in a way where I can do it all. We'll see!

STORE CLOSING:

I've been meaning to close the store soon, since it doesn't really make sense to have it going all year with the montly fees and all. Now the service I'm using it raising the monthly price quite a bit, so that's as good a reason as any to close shop for now.

I've been seeing that Youtube is now able to integrate some types of online stores, so I may try to set something up through that at a later date. But for now, it will just be going offline so if you really want something here and now, this month's the last chance for now.

ROUND-UP:

And that seems to be that for this month. I am most certainly keeping busy, but summer is almost here, and this time around I will have my vacation! I am not nearly as pressed as I was around this time last year though, and I try to keep a decent balance overall. I just can't help taking on a little bit extra, because a lot of the work including Tales of Zale and indie projects really helps to recharge me in a way. There's just so much fun stuff to be made!

Till next time, all the best!

-Sif